FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Elephant Rave 2]

Hmm, a bit mixed on this one! As a preface, I'm coming at this from a place of having no knowledge of Elephant Rave 1 or other related pieces, so take that as you will.

For the most part I am rather positive on it as it is a wonderfully energetic and psychedelic experience which absolutely assaults the senses (in a good way). Despite being so short, the way the presentation fires on all cylinders really served to add a certain level of wonder and mystique to the gameplay that makes it all very memorable and addictively gripping.

However, part of me is a bit more cynical, instead seeing the game as a very 'style over substance' experience, the equivalent of jangling keys in front of a child to distract them from the rather simplistic 'dodge laser beams over and over' gameplay that is at its core.

Now, there's nothing wrong with using juice and pizazz to elevate an experience as that is a huge part of game design, and the game does take steps to elevate the difficulty as it goes on, introducing factors like a scrolling background and big lasers and so on. I'm not trying to call you lazy fraudsters or tricksters or anything like that, but the game did feel a bit short-lived and shallow.

The most important aspect that I think the game gets wrong is the difficulty curve. It starts out really strong by slowly evolving the gameplay over stages: faster and denser lasers, weird gravity mechanics, the scrolling screen and so on. But then, when it looks like it is going to introduce a brand new challenging mechanic of darkness, making it so that you can only see your elephant in-between flashes of light, suddenly the game pulls its punches by allowing you to be able to see the elephant plain as day. Why set it all up and get my hyped only to drop the ball? From there, the game retreats back to standard laser dodging, and it continues to do so with no other significant evolutions until the game just...ends. It felt like such a letdown! The game was building up slowly and getting more intense, only for it to just stall out and lose all the momentum.

Again, I think it's still a fun and memorable experience, and I very much enjoy the charm and warmth of this revisit to Newgrounds after a long absence and all that jazz, but if I have to be honest and take the game on its own merits, I really felt like it lost its momentum halfway and soured the experience slightly. If anything though, take it as a compliment that it grabbed me and made me want so much more out of it!

[POKO LOCO]

Hrmm, this is a rough one for me! I really want to like this game as it does have a decent level of polish and juice to its craftsmanship and presentation, but I found myself very bored in no time as the core gameplay is incredibly shallow, repetitive, and one-note: it takes no time at all to see everything the game has to offer and there is no significant evolution as it goes on. It feels more like a rough draft or a prototype that hasn't yet found a core gameplay loop or unique concept yet.

As said, the game is quite lively and juicy, yet simultaneously very bland as well. Apart from some nice special effects for timed bounces and the psychedelic animated background, the game has a very bland, empty and almost clinically sterile look and feel to it when it comes to elements like the paddle and the unchanging world as you proceed forward in levels.

Compared to the lively title screen, I was really disappointed at the bland wall of text that is the tutorial. I'll grant you that it is at least categorized properly and tries to space out the sentences to help with reading comprehension, but I would much prefer if there were pictures or animations to help. Also the tutorial keeps repeating the same instructions over and over for some reason: if you can't even proofread the tutorial properly it doesn't give me much faith in the rest of the game. And to top it all off, the game says I can use WASD in the tutorial, yet it doesn't work and instead I had to use the arrow keys.

Bump timing for powerful bounces could be a fun mechanic, but it just felt incredibly frustrating and awkward to get used to it: it felt like you need to time the bump way too early when I expected it to be right when the ball hits the paddle, and even taking this into account I was constantly having my bumps not bounce the ball, leading to tedious gameplay in an already very repetitive game.

As said, the game feels like a step back from tons of other games that have come before it. Compared to more exciting powerups like being able to shoot bullets, summon multiballs, slow-mo, catching the ball, and so on, this game's powerups that just adjust paddle width and speed feel dire and don't excite. The bonus level doesn't even feel like a bonus level since it doesn't have its own music track or exciting scoring system. And as already said, every level just feels the same with no interesting layouts or new exciting mechanics: a couple bouncers being added here and there doesn't thrill me and keep me engaged. It just feels like a big waste of effort and is so incredibly outdated: I'd rather play something like Arkanoid on the NES which, for being decades old, has many times the amount of content and variety than seen here.

I want to like this game and think you've got a potentially great team here that can get stuff done, but there's just absolutely nothing exciting or fun about this game in its current state: it is the most bland student project paddle game, a bland scoop of vanilla ice cream with no sprinkles or whipped cream and definitely not a cherry on top. Make sure there is a focus on fun and addictive core gameplay in your next project before anything else.

KageKMB responds:

I fundamentally disagree with a lot of these criticisms. This game is a culmination of what I learn doing these leader-board focused browser titles. A key thing I honed in on, was what clicked with NG players, and what didn't.

To use Masahiro Sakurai's definition of game essence - your main criticisms can be summarized as "this game lacks game essence." However, things that increases game essence decreases broad appeal. There's a threshold with your target audience that if you cross it - they get frustrated at the challenge rather than entertained by it. Part of being a successful game designer is knowing how to be a people pleaser.

I personally play games with a lot of game essence. I also have to remember, one of Friday Night Funkin's common criticisms can be summarized as " too little game essence" - but it's also like the biggest game to come out of the NG community in a decade. If I dropped a game that fundamentally required you to do fighting game quarter circles and dragon punch motions, I'd be more to my taste, but I also don't see it getting past 3 stars.

Poko Loco was made with this site's general player-base in mind, (the itch.io uploads of the games never get hits lol)- and looking at the majority of feedback, I think I've demonstrated I'm honing in on understanding what works for this group. I'm not saying this with the intent of having an ego - but to illustrate that I had an intention, and got result in the ballpark I intended.

_________________
regarding some things like the WASD issue - that was a minor over-site and i've been wanting to do a minor adjustment patch sooner than later - but need to find the time.

[Spider Collab]

Cute art collab!

While it is a bit disappointing that it is just a slideshow which is what I consider very basic and minimal effort (c'mon, you couldn't do something a tiny bit more creative, like arrange all the pieces in a spiderweb-esque gallery view? it took me seconds to think of that, I'm sure you'd think of something way cooler) it does nevertheless have some nice presentation to it with its animated background and cool music, and I was pleased to see that it does have the critical convenience functionality of allowing you to click on the artist's name to go to their respective Newgrounds page (though I almost thought it didn't since it doesn't look like a button due to not reacting on mousing over).

Would also love if there was some ability to zoom in to the art pieces as some of them, like Anonymous's-Frog piece, can be difficult to see all the intricate details at the scale it is currently presented in.

Anyway, at the end of the day it's always nice to see a community event like this, and ever since I brokered a deal with the spiders in my closet to let them live since they kill other bugs for me, its great to see them respected here.

Thetageist responds:

Yo, that'd be cool! If there's another Spider Collab, that should totally be how it's presented!

[Lost For Swords]

Pretty neat game! Overall everything feels pretty interesting, well-polished and intuitive, thanks to the good use of animations, UI and feedback, as well as the tooltips/info you acquire through being able to practically right-click on any element: while the tutorial did a decent job at laying down everything I needed to know, whenever there was a part of the game I was slightly confused about, such as the aura cards, it was great to be able to easily find out more through a right-click. With that, I had a pretty good time getting to the heart of the game, strategizing and planning my way move-by-move through a room, nay, through the floors: fun stuff!

There were a few parts that did trip me up a bit though:

*There are some instances where tooltips and menus will actually go off-screen, rendering portions unreadable or actions inaccessible. An example of a menu going over would be the hero's deck, where the close button is only half-onscreen, and even an item as simple as the knife can have tooltips that go off-screen and make it impossible to read about the 'reusable' property.

*Whenever I wanted to select a card below my current active card, whether it be in the weapon or armor deck, it was very difficult and fiddly to pull off: you kind of have to put the mouse over it very slowly or something awkward, it was very inconsistent and would usually either not target the card below at all or refuse to move the targetter from the card on top/active card.

*While the tooltips are very nice, perhaps they could be reduced to be more brief, spaced out between sentences, or at the very least bold important words: they can end up just being a big wall of words that is difficult to parse.

*While I got used to it eventually, I found the durability system very confusing. On initial inspection of the cards, it seemed like the knife had 3 uses while the rusty sword had infinite uses, but instead the knife had 4 uses while the rusty sword had 1. Why not just list the durability on all weapon cards like that immediately instead of this awkward state where it has one more use when the durability counter is gone? As said, even if I accepted that the rusty sword is single use because it has no durability counter, it was really awkward to realize the knife technically has 4, not 3, uses, because it still has a 'zero' state after reducing reuses to 1. Usually when something has a 1, it means 1 more use, not two more!

*I found the death state of the player really awkward and delayed: sometimes I was surprised to find out that I'm dead because my guy still looks fine and enemies still play out the rest of their turn before a full game over screen pops up afterwards. I think when you die the game should full-stop immediately with no further turns from anything and it should have a bit more fanfare, like your guy exploding or keeling over with a scream, mayhaps.

*Call me stupid, but I was a bit confused at what the goal was initially of a run. The tutorial gives a certain precedence to prioritizing getting away and not necessarily killing everything, so I figured my goal was just to get to lower floors while picking up loot when I could do so without considerable risk. The whole 'backtracking' thing confused me: I didn't realize it was punishing me because I hadn't killed everything yet, I thought it was just making me walk into and out of the dungeon with my loot to complete a run. Eventually I realized that killing everything was the goal, but perhaps it could've been made more clear somehow.

*While I like the game, it is rather dry, both in a graphical sense and in a story sense: there's just a lack of a strong motivation through some sort of fun characters or ultimate goal or changing environments or some sort of progression of that nature. I understand this is most likely part of the active development, but I just wanted to be sure to emphasize just in case.

[Adventure Kitty: Drill Buster: Revamped]

Pretty cool game! For the most part, it feels really solid and well-polished in a lot of respects: gameplay is simple, fun and addictive, the characters and world are charming (especially with how the main character ignores the lore and goes straight into action), the game evolves with some interesting obstacles and new mechanics like the arrows, and I like most of the additions brought into this update such as the new level select screen, the 'close call' popup, the score screens, and the nice menus/buttons and transitions. Lots of good stuff here!

However, it ain't all perfect and there were some parts I wanted to note:

*While I do like the new menus/buttons and such overall, they aren't all created equal. For example, while the video and audio menus are great, the control menu is terribly bland and inconsistent in comparison. The title screen is also a bit static and could use a bit more animation to it. The level select menu was also odd is that it feels a bit too zoomed in: could stand to be zoomed out enough to see several levels grouped together, not just one at a time (also, the level select should only let you go as far as your last level, not beyond to the locked levels, pointless and confusing).

*Lots of minor typos in the script (mostly stuff like using "you're" when you should be using "your" and other unnecessary/incorrect punctuation) and minor graphical issues like the text within speech bubbles practically going over the edges: nothing too bad but it just gives a bit of a lesser impression of the game.

*Game felt very lacking in audio, and I'm not even referring to the fact that it defaults the audio to way too muted to begin with. Rather, sometimes it was just audio not being balanced properly with some sound effects being way quieter than others (like the laser shoot and explosion in the intro comic) and sometimes it was just that certain actions that feel like they should have sound, such as the elevator for ending a level or the score screen counting up ticker sounds.

*Speaking of the score screen, I found it very confusing to determine how to get a good rank. I'd have runs where I thought I did awesome get a B and runs where I died a bunch and thought I did terrible get a Z. I didn't know whether deaths factored into score since it is off to the side instead of being part of the main criteria, I don't know why or how tiles are considered part of the score (should I unnecessarily dig more tiles beyond what I need to get to the goal?), and so on and so forth. It would be very helpful if it had par scores/times/etc to go for, and if it would divulge more information on how your score added up based on what elements and how you rank for each individually.

*I didn't like how the game allows you to keep overflow coins from a previous level into another level: it's ok to be able to keep between puzzles within a level, but not beyond that, I feel, especially since if you quit out and go to a level from the level select, it'll start you fresh instead of preserving the coins you carried over. There should be consistency!

*I didn't like how the game allows you to keep coins/arrows you've collected when you reach the barrier without enough. It resets everything else, so why the exception here? I think the challenge should be to have to gather everything in one solid run: it's more fun and requires strategy and execution. If you go to the barrier without even coins/arrows, it should fully reset the entire puzzle, otherwise a player and tediously collect one at a time over several runs, optimizing the fun and challenge out of the game.

*Does the game really end with you just getting the earth element? I was expecting a bit more content, like other worlds to go to with their own elements to gather (they did say there were three at the beginning, yes?), and even if it ends with the earth element I was also expecting it to end with a bit more of a fantastic finish, like a cool boss fight or ending cutscene, not just fade to black and get booted back to main menu. Kind of a letdown despite the fun journey.

*Had a weird glitch: after I beat the game, I tried to go back to the main menu to check out the options but suddenly I couldn't access any of the menus: it'd make sounds when I press buttons but I couldn't go beyond the video menu or access anything, essentially being frozen.

Hoping there will be further development and levels for this game!

[Coglab]

Cute little art collab! It's just one screen and there's not much to it, but it's still nice to look at and pretty creative with its very animated layout and presentation: certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the typical 'slideshow' art collab presentation. Not too shabby: only major complaints I can think of is that it would be nice to have direct links to the author's Newgrounds page if you click on their name when viewing their cog, and that something about this concept really makes me wish it was even more crazy, like being able to drag the cogs around and make your own connections, or even making a whole cog-based puzzle game where you use these pieces within them, but maybe that's asking a bit much, haha.

Quest responds:

Those are excellent ideas. Thank you for the feedback (:

[Eggy]

Interesting little game! I like the intent behind it being a goofy little fumblecore game and while it was rather short, it did make a memorable and funny experience. However, while it was charming in its weirdness and I can understand a fumblecore game being a little fiddly and confusing to add to the challenge and said charm, this did go a bit overboard in having some elements being frustrating. For example, it was easy to lose track of elements like where the plates and eggs were due to everything being a mish-mash of tiny overlapping grey pixels, and the feeling of picking things up felt rather weightless and unsatisfying: could use a bit more subtleties to it, like some sort of confirmation feedback such as snapping upon successful pinch? Lots of potential here: just might've needed a bit more polish on the core controls and feedback!

[LAUNDRY DETERGENT QUEST]

In the context of a game that was made live for the Summer Fest, this is quite impressive in many respects, and therefore I'll try to be nicer than usual, haha.

Yes, it is pretty much a shitpost game, but it actually has a lot of quality behind its goofy facade. Good enemy variety and escalation that keeps things interesting as you proceed, juicy explosive feedback for blowing up enemies along with the amusing spectacle of gun upgrades, general smooth and lively movement and animations, and an...interesting choice of music. There's even some interesting strategy to the game where, especially due to the suicide enemies, you can choose to try and play it slow and cautiously, or just blow them up all fast enough to clear the bullets from the screen before they hit you (and be rewarded with cash for doing so). All in all it delivers a decent short and sweet adventure that doesn't outstay its welcome!

I play a lot of shooters on this here website, and to see something like this, while certainly lacking in long-term appeal, get so many things right in terms of juicy core feel that other more developed games lack, and to teach those aspects to people in a timely manner, is pretty inspirational, and makes me hope that more people step up and create their own juicy games.

However, even if I am being nice, there are plenty of rough aspects to the game:

*Collecting money was quite annoying, both in part to how you have to stand directly on top of it to pick it up (lacking the generous magnetic attraction that games of this ilk typically have) and that the level up screen can end up blocking visibility of the money (which just so happens to be the time that you want to collect the money!)

*No idea what the difficulty unlock on the level up screen was about: I'm assuming that it is a risk/reward element that increases the amount of enemies which in turn allows you to score more points, but I couldn't really tell.

*Certain elements like the recoil from shooting felt a bit frustrating to handle: didn't feel like it added enough to the game to justify the annoyance.

*The music is...uh...g-great!

LeviRamirez responds:

I made this for the summer fest in a day and a half, but I'll probably use this as the groundwork for another sizeable project, either commercial or not

thanks for the feedback, this will affect a future game! :) <3

[Resident Evil Ebola 5]

Bit mixed on this one!

If you view the game as a throwback to old-school Newgrounds games, it can be fun to laugh at all of its oddities, like the mismatched sprite rips from all sorts of games, the corny voice acting with variable sound quality, the overly dramatic story, the overall janky feel to the controls, and just that nostalgic aesthetic that's so synonymous with early flash games.

However, in that same respect, a lot of the game is just really sloppily put together and feels incredibly low effort and confusing: I can accept corny voice acting and such since that adds to the charm, but a lot of the errors and confusion I experienced were just plain bad.

A few examples of the rough spots which I feel could've been ironed out:

*The game was very inconsistent with its interactables. Sometimes the game would highlight them, such as having the lever have a sparkle on it, or having the back of the plane glow green: this was great as it let me know I could interact with them. However, for other aspects like the hole in the wall, or the bridge controls, and so on, there was nothing to let you know you could interact with it, leading to confusion. There were also weird times where, despite usually being able to just walk to the edge of a screen to go to the next zone, suddenly it'd want you to interact to move to the next zone. If the game was better with popping up a button to let you know you can interact or highlighting things, it'd be much clearer.

*Merchant behavior was very odd with how buying handgun bullets from him says you get 15 bullets, but end up getting 10 bullets actually. I believe there were other cases of similar miscounting when picking up bullets from the ground.

*All sorts of strange layering and clipping issues, like how some text when I picked up bullets popped up behind an object in the foreground which made it difficult to read, or how the green highlight for the airplane could still be seen when you open up the inventory. Just looks really bad.

*Despite the game saying you can open up your inventory wherever you want, there were plenty of screens where suddenly you couldn't: no idea why not.

*A lot of time when I'm shooting the enemy, it'll be like every other bullet will not hurt the enemy as there will be no blood splash or other feedback. Dunno if this is intentional as some sort of random chance to miss, or whether the bullet is actually hitting but just not triggering the blood feedback for some reason, or if the bullet is just straight-up glitching out and not hitting for no good reason.

*Player damage was really confusing: I'd be miles away from an enemy but still end up flashing red outta nowhere, getting hurt but no good reason I could tell. I'd even get hurt by leftover corpses of enemies: not sure if this was some intentional design like acid blood leftovers, but there was no way to avoid it if that's the case, so it's bad either way. On the flip side, however, there would be enemies sometimes that would come right up to me and not hurt me at all: they'd just latch onto me and jitter around!

I could go on and on, but you get the gist. So yeah, it was a fun trip, but in a way, I do wish it was put together way better: I'd prefer to be laughing with the game instead of laughing at it, if you know what I mean! There must be a way to get that old-school look without making it feel so outdated and clunky to play.

MetaMike responds:

Many thanks to you for taking the time to type this. It's greatly appreciated. many of these things you pointed out are small technical issues that I could've easily ironed out. I guess I skipped over some of them in the end, but I'll definitely be making some adjustments and fixing them.
The Merchant actually rips you off, that wasn't a glitch...(jk lol) the ammo count is one I definitely didn't notice. Some of the coding from the merchant was carried over from previous chapters and the values obviously weren't the same. I'll be making various fixes rn, thanks to your feedback.

EDIT - I fixed just about everything you mentioned.

[Bullet Bunny]

Wow, quite enjoyed myself with this one! I wasn't all that impressed at first glance as the survivor genre is overpacked with competition, but I was surprised at how this ended up addicting me with its pretty fun gameplay, so kudos in that respect!

The vibes reminded me a lot of 20 Minutes Till Dawn, especially when it comes to the build variety with different focuses on summons, traps, elements, damage, projectiles, reload, and so on: wouldn't be surprised if it was a direct inspiration or straight-up lifting from its playbook, haha! I thought at first that the summon build would be the only fun build, but color me surprised when I liked laying down traps or having light-based radial slowdown/fire or having chain explosions and so on. No matter what the cards dealt it felt like you could get something cool going in lots of different ways!

For the most part, the game was pretty well put-together. As said, I quite like the build variety and the power progression as the game goes along, especially when combined with the enemy escalation with all sorts of different types of enemies that go beyond just simple statistical increases, but actual different patterns that make you change up your strategies. Game also offered a lot of interesting weapons and heroes, and I liked that you can try them out before actually having to buy them (though I was disappointed that there was no way to try out hero super moves).

That being said, while the game is fun, I'm not quite sure about the long-term appeal. The fact that it's just a single map (or rather a single screen) with no special events or quests or modifiers that can really shake up the experience from run to run, can make it feel a bit repetitive and pointless. Furthermore, the game doesn't really have a unique selling point to it: as much as I have fun with it, it is, as I mentioned, just like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, so there's nothing this really gives me that that game doesn't already, so why would I buy this? Not sure if the game is going to develop some sort of story, or multiple levels, or other interesting aspects and content to keep people playing. It doesn't necessarily need to, but without some sort of larger purpose or sense of greater progression beyond just goofing around with different guns and maybe cranking the difficulty, I feel like I wouldn't be compelled to stick with it for long, let alone spend money on it.

In addition to that, there were a few confusing aspects here and there:

*For example, I found it frustrating that you can get cards like +50% poison damage when you don't even have a poison weapon: because you can still get these despite that, players (like me) can be fooled into thinking the card will give you poison damage, only to find that it doesn't.

*I found it a bit odd that killing enemies will sometimes have that explode in a satisfying manner, whereas other times they will just poof away in an awkward manner: thought it was overkill damage at first, but that didn't seem to be the case, so I don't know why there is an inconsistency.

*It was strange that the game doesn't offer a way to manually reload as a strategic decision to make. I also thought the reload bar was a bit odd: I expected it to stretch all across the player, but it ends like half-way.

*Would've liked if there were some HUD elements right next to the player, such as an ammo and health count: it's difficult to keep track of those considering they are crammed in the corner of the screen which is hard to peek at during combat.

*Would also love if the number of damage you took as a player would pop up as it was really confusing to determine how badly I got hurt: maybe it'd be nice if you just normalize damage with hearts instead of numbers? So weird to take '18' damage as a normal thing instead of a basic round number like 10 or 5 (i know, i know, it's because of all the percentage defense stuff you can get).

*Finally, it was really awkward that the visual effect for the knockback that comes with levelling up happens immediately when you level up, but disappears before you're done with the level up screen and then the knockback happens afterwards, making them feel disjointed: feel like you should freeze/delay the visual effect until you're done with the level up screen so that both visual effect and actual knockback happen in sync.

I'd say you have a really solid and fun core gameplay here that I'd love to see iterated upon: best of luck for the eventual full release!

penusbmic responds:

Hey Futurecop! Thanks for the feedback, so valuable :)

A lot of what you feel is exactly how I feel! Number of damage you take is a great idea that has slipped by my mind. Also HUD stats by the player, I think I may add this as an option.

I grouped Poison/Dodge together since early on in playtesting they were both kind of weak/lame to pick. I've thought about exactly what you said, but don't want to remove dodge at the moment, perhaps an overhaul to both is the right move!

Reloading was also in the early build ultimately decided to remove it as "Reload Bomb" was the only build testers wanted and it did a fix amount of damage. Perhaps I can revisit this now that there's a ton of different/viable build options.

As for you main point about long term appeal. I have tested out a few different kind of game modes, 1 in particular is fun but a tad hardcore. I'd love to somehow incorporate some sort of story/lore kind of in a subtle way, but as a solo dev that keeps getting push down the list :(

anyways, again thank you for you valuable feedback, greatly appreciated! :)
Pen